This is an arranged photograph of The Pirate Bay homepage, taken Nov. 21, 2008. (AP Photo/Scanpix, Marc Femenia, File)

(Newser)
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The Pirate Bay is down for the count after a raid on one of the file-sharing company's server rooms in Sweden yesterday, Reuters reports. "We had a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay," an intellectual property crime coordinator for local police says. According to sources for TorrentFreak, computers, servers, and other equipment were seized. It's the first time in years the site has actually been taken offline instead of just blocked, the BBC notes. Other file-sharing sites such as EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage were also offline, Reuters notes.

An interesting theory that's been floated for the seemingly sudden raid, said by TorrentFreak to have taken place at a "data center in Nacka which is built into a 'mountain'": downloads of movies stolen during the recent Sony leak, though Wired notes no one's sure yet if that was the impetus. Peter Sunde, a TPB founder busted in Sweden this summer after two years on the lam, is jumping ship, writing yesterday in a blog post that "I've not been a fan of what TPB has become," and that the site "was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design" and teeming with "distasteful" ads. The Pirate Bay briefly popped up again last night using a .cr domain (for Costa Rica), but it's currently offline again, RT.com reports. (TPB was invited by North Korea to route its service through that country.)